Episodes

In a lot of towns there is only one health insurer left, and that is starting to show up in patient care. Rita Agarwal is a pediatric anesthesiologist who started asking why colleagues in a specialty she loves are heading for the door. This episode is based on her article "Insurance consolidation is a patient safety problem," published on KevinMD. She explains why anesthesiology went from a top residency choice to the specialty with the highest intent to leave, and what happens to a team when th...

Ketamine made headlines for the wrong reasons, and people who could be helped by it are staying away. Jim Ellwood is an anesthesiologist who has given ketamine in the operating room and taken it himself for depression that nine medications failed to touch. This episode is based on his article "The truth about ketamine: an anesthesiologist explains drug safety," published on KevinMD. He explains what the research shows about how it works in the brain, and what to ask before you walk into a clinic...

You can have five doctors and still have no one actually in charge of your care. That gap is where patients get lost. In this episode, retired surgeon and patient advocate Alan P. Feren walks through a common case where the surgeon, primary care, and specialists each assume someone else is directing the plan, and no one is. This episode is based on his article "Fragmented care needs clinical direction, not more data," published on KevinMD. You will hear why coordination is not the same as clinic...

A resident read a student's personal statement and asked why she didn't just use ChatGPT. The comment landed like a wound. In this episode, certified coach and professor Kathleen Muldoon returns to unpack what a residency personal statement is actually for, and why an algorithm can't do it for you. This episode is based on her article "Why ChatGPT can't write your residency personal statement," published on KevinMD. You will hear why the product was never the essay but the self-knowledge that co...

At one university, the share of students receiving disability accommodations rose sevenfold in a decade. Is that progress? In this episode, health care educator and patient advocate Richard A. Lawhern argues that psychiatric overdiagnosis is handicapping the very students it aims to help, and that the research underneath much of modern psychiatry may not hold up. This episode is based on his article "Why psychiatric overdiagnosis fails the students who suffer," published on KevinMD. You will hea...

After 20 years as a pediatrician, she stopped believing burnout meant she couldn't hack it. The problem was never her. In this episode, pediatrician and physician career development coach Gita Balakumar reframes burnout as a systemic burden wrongly blamed on the individual, and offers a different way to think about it. This episode is based on her article "What physicians and dragonflies share in resilience and agility," published on KevinMD. Drawing on the dragonfly, an insect revered across cu...

At 2 a.m., a surgeon needed an answer fast and had no one to ask. So he built the tool himself, with no coding background. In this episode, consultant cardiac anesthesiologist Ahmed Elsonbaty explains how a single bleeding-patient case in the operating room pushed him to create bedside clinical decision-support tools now used by more than 10,000 doctors across 150 countries. This episode is based on his article "I built clinical decision-support tools at the bedside," published on KevinMD. You w...

When his shifts were cut during the pandemic, he took a telemedicine job to pay the bills and ended up loving it. Suneer Chander is an emergency physician who co-wrote the article "Telemedicine as a career, not a side gig," published on KevinMD. He makes the case that telemedicine is the most impactful public health advance to come out of the pandemic, yet most doctors treat it as weekend income instead of the career patients actually need it to be. You will hear why so few physicians work in it...

An eye surgeon who used to see forty patients a day now sees one to three in a morning, and he has no staff. Oren Fass, a board-certified ophthalmologist and cataract surgeon, has been an employed physician, a practice owner, and an owner who sold to private equity, and he now runs a solo micro practice. This episode is based on his article "The hidden variable in the physician burnout debate," published on KevinMD. You will hear how his agents read incoming faxes, start the scheduling, and appl...

He was sued for a case he barely remembered, and five years later it pushed him out of medicine. It is not just malpractice. Jordan Grumet is an internal medicine physician and the author of The Healthcare Heist: How Physicians and Patients Can Unite to Transform Health Care. In this conversation he traces how third parties like insurers, pharmaceutical companies, private equity, and malpractice lawyers pull money and agency out of the system and leave doctors and patients worse off. You will he...

She built a thriving practice in Manhattan and appeared all over the media. Then she walked away, and it was never burnout. Samantha Nazareth is a gastroenterologist and the author of the memoir I Left Anyway: The Life I Was Supposed to Want. In this conversation she describes a deliberate triple exit from her practice, her home, and a ten-year relationship, and the six-week sabbatical that became years of travel. You will hear why she did not wait for retirement or a collapse to ask whether med...

A teacher came in for migraines and weight loss with a stack of leaky gut test results and a diagnosis that never fixed her. Shiv K. Goel is a board-certified internal medicine and functional medicine physician who argues that leaky gut is not a diagnosis but a physiological response, and that the upstream driver is often chronic stress and a dysregulated cortisol rhythm. This episode is based on his article "Why your leaky gut tests aren't fixing your symptoms," published on KevinMD. You will h...

A young patient walks in with ordinary back pain and leaves on a path that can quietly weaken the muscle holding the spine together. Francisco M. Torres is an interventional physiatrist who noticed these patients coming back to him sooner, and traced it to radiofrequency ablation denervating the multifidus, the back's most important stabilizer, until the muscle atrophies and fills with fat. This episode is based on his article "Radiofrequency ablation and the young back pain patient," published ...

For years, doctors told this pediatrician her pain was fibromyalgia and depression. It was quietly starving her aorta. Victoria Rundus is a board-certified pediatrician who spent four years being misdiagnosed before an ER physician finally listened to her abdomen and heard what everyone else had missed. This episode is based on her article "Diagnostic bias almost cost me my life," published on KevinMD. You will hear how a single label can close the door on everything else, both for the physician...

A tech founder used one pediatrician's public advice to train her own AI. Sonal Patel decided doctors should own the tools built on their knowledge instead. Patel is a pediatrician and neonatologist who built and controls her own AI for the fourth trimester. This episode is based on her article "Physicians must shape AI in medicine, not watch it," published on KevinMD. You will hear why she believes the doctor who uses AI, not AI itself, is the real threat to the one who ignores it. She explains...

Your doctor may help you live longer, but has likely never asked if intimacy still matters to you. In this episode, Michael Reed, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, certified menopause practitioner, and fellowship-trained cosmetic gynecologic surgeon, explains why so many women are never given the chance to raise sexual health concerns with their physician. You will hear why medicine taught women that these topics are off limits, why doctors trained to fix what is broken often miss wha...

Your blood pressure is fine. Your cholesterol looks great. So why do you still feel exhausted, wired, and unwell? Internal medicine and functional medicine physician Shiv K. Goel returns to explain what standard lab panels miss when chronic stress quietly reshapes the body. This episode is based on his article "Normal labs miss what most patients are living through," published on KevinMD. You will hear how sustained stress ripples through your hormones, gut, and immune system, and why a patient ...

A medical student offered a professor $1,000 to write their residency essay, and the reason why was not laziness. In this episode, Kathleen Muldoon, a certified coach and medical education professor, shares what she learned when she sat that student down for an honest conversation. You will hear why so many students freeze on the personal statement, why the fear is less about writing and more about who they think they are allowed to be on the page, and how this connects to a kind of burnout that...

A 30-year-old soldier can have the knees of a 60-year-old. Not from one bad injury, but from carrying a load every single day for years. Family medicine and sports medicine physician Ann Lebeck returns to explain why she came to see soldiers as tactical athletes, and what that means for their bodies. This episode is based on her article "Military sports medicine and the cost of readiness," published on KevinMD. You will hear why young recruits who never played sports kept saying the Army broke t...

Your patients are asking ChatGPT what's wrong with them before they call your office, and getting an answer in seconds. In this episode, Tod Stillson, a board-certified family physician, medical device inventor, and health care entrepreneur, explains how AI chatbots became the new waiting room, and what that means for the doctor who used to be the first call. You will hear why patients turn to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini instead of waiting days for a reply, how AI companies are racing to own the...

A patient asked for her knee surgery by its brand name. She used the term perfectly. She just had no idea what it actually meant. Orthopedic surgeon Cory Calendine, who does nearly 700 to 800 hip and knee replacements a year, returns to unpack how marketing is quietly reshaping what patients ask for in the exam room. This episode is based on his article "Knee replacement marketing undermines informed consent," published on KevinMD. You will hear why trademarked procedure names now get searched m...

Two families raise their kids in completely different ways. Both are doing it right. So why do clinicians so often assume one of them is doing something wrong? Najat Fadlalla, a developmental behavioral pediatric fellow, returns to unpack how cultural bias creeps into parent coaching, the first-line, evidence-based approach for children with or at risk of ADHD. This episode is based on her article "How cultural competence transforms modern parent coaching," published on KevinMD. You will hear wh...

A doctor spoke up about problems in his residency, and months later he was walked out in front of his patients. In this episode, Vasilii Khammad, a physician and researcher who came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar, shares what happened after he and fellow residents raised concerns about their training program. You will hear how the feedback against him was anonymous and never documented, how he was pushed toward a psychiatric evaluation he never asked for, and how he was removed with...

A nurse survived a violent assault at work, then watched her hospital treat her like a liability, not a victim. In this episode, June Garen, a retired psychiatric and operating room nurse and author, and Carleigh Beriont, a former union organizer who teaches U.S. history and public policy, explain why violence against nurses and doctors gets treated as part of the job. You will hear what actually happens to a health care worker after an assault, why so many facilities do not even track these inc...